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Unicon Upgrades Learning Environment Test Drive to Sakai 2.8

Gilbert, AZ – July 10, 2012— Unicon, Inc., a leading IT professional services provider specializing in open source for the education market, announced today that it has upgraded its Test Drive Sakai environment to Sakai 2.8. Unicon developed this test configuration to help users freely explore the features and benefits of Sakai, the leading enterprise teaching, learning, and academic collaboration platform, through online tutorials and sample courses. Test Drive Sakai uses a branded, native community source version of Sakai and provides users with a variety of course sites (including Biology 101, Business 315, and the Astronomy Club,) as well as their own personal worksite (labeled “course shell”).

New to Sakai 2.8 are the Lesson Builder, Assignments2, and Gradebook2 tools. The Lesson Builder is a tool that allows an instructor to organize resources, quizzes, tests, and media on a single page. Assignments2 enables instructors to create, distribute, collect, return, and grade assignments. Each student's submissions are private and can only be seen by the instructor and that student. Gradebook2 allows instructors to calculate, store, and distribute class grade information to their students. Also included in the test drive is the Kaltura Video Tool for Sakai, available for use in the course shell. The tool provides users the ability to upload, catalog, edit, share, and publish video and related content. To help acquaint users with these tools and others, a library of instructional videos has been added.

Test Drive Sakai is available to users free of charge. It is an effective tool in helping new users and future users of Sakai get acquainted with the tool set and capabilities. For users well-versed in Sakai, it can provide an opportunity to explore the new features in the latest Sakai release.

About Sakai
Built by higher education for higher education, Sakai is a community source online collaboration and learning environment that provides a framework and pluggable tool modules for managing, delivering, and assessing student learning. It is designed to bring students and instructors together for knowledge sharing, discussion, and shared learning. Users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, and research collaboration. Visit sakaiproject.org to learn more about the tools and features that make up Sakai.